82 THE THEATRE Travelling Man and Hesitating Woman T HE interior of the newly re- stored and rechristened Walter Kerr Theatre (it was formerly the Ritz), where August Wilson's "The Piano Lesson" opened last week, is truly exquisite. I have an idea that parts of Wilson's play must be exqui- site, too. Unfortunately, I found it dif- ficult to see past the head of the ex- tremely tall man sitting in front of me. Offhand, I can think of no playwright whose work is harder to appreciate in such a situation. Wilson is unusual among contemporary playwrights in that he writes for the proscenium stage. His plays tend to present two juxta- posed areas-the adjoining rooms of a recording studio, or the world within someone's back yard and the world outside it, or a boarding house where people stay briefly and the city of roads and bridges that carry them away- and you have to be able to view the whole stage to get the full effect of w hat is happening there. In the case of "The Piano Lesson," which takes place in the house of a black family in Pittsburgh in 1936, the stage is divided into two rooms ( evoked by E. David Cosier, Jr.): a living room, where the piano in question sits, and where the person who wants to sell it does most of his talking; and a kitchen, where people mostly talk about why it couldn't or shouldn't or won't be sold. There are some spell- binding scenes in "The Piano Lesson" -like the one in which a man sits in the living room talking about his hands while in the kitchen a woman goes through the elaborate process of tam- ing her little girl's hair with a hot comb and grease. WHat the man is talking about-working to produce something that white men will own- goes back to slavery. What the woman is doing-using her hands to make her daughter conform to white fashion- looks toward the future. Because of w here the actors were placed in this sequence, something of its meaning came across to me. But most of the important scenes in Act I-like the one in which a room comes alive with the movement of men singing a work song, and the one in which we hear the history of the piano-take place on the right side of the stage, the side that this very tall man and I were sitting on. I would have gone back the next night, but I quailed at the prospect of sitting through Charles S. Dutton's perfor- . mance agaIn. Dutton is the central character, Boy Willie, whose arrival and departure frame the play, and Dutton's perfor- mance, which could all too easily win him a Tony Award (it seems calcu- lated to), and which has already won the actor praise, is, I think, terribly damaging to the delicate structure of Wilson's play. Like the performances that Lloyd Richards-who directed "The Piano Lesson"-elicited from James Earl Jones, Mary Alice, Court- ney Vance, and Frankie Faison in Wil- son's "Fences," it is essentially a bid for attention. It's not so much stagy as self-conscious; indeed, self-con- sciousness is virtually its only quality. Stagy acting is what Maggie Smith does so well in "Lettice & Lovage"- projecting the mannerisms of someone who doesn't behave the way real people behave. What Dutton is doing is stagy only in the sense that you know (be- cause something in the actor's bearing or timing or intonation tells you) when a big line is coming up; for the rest, it's projected realism: the simulation of a feeling-anxiety , say, or indignation -at such a pitch that the audience is constantly aware of watching the per- formance of an actor in a play. What impresses people about this sort of acting may be its effortfulness. In Mr. Dutton's case, effort means speed. Dutton bursts onto the stage at the beginning of the playacting at such APRIL 30,1990 a level of hysteria that his performance has now here to go; his character talks incessantly, compulsively, and Dutton delivers practically every speech with the unvarying, frenzied purposefulness of a crazed auctioneer. He induces a sort of delirium, so that by the end of the evening it's impossible to focus on anything Boy Willie is saying. To be fair, it's hard to know how else an actor could approach the role. "The Piano Lesson" is a play that desperately wants cutting, and Boy Willie has most of the long speeches. Yet Dutton's performance isn't about subtlety, and all the rest of the perfor- mances are, as is the play. With the exception of "Fences," all Wilson's plays are subtle: they explore complex ideas by constructing around some as- pect of the experience of black Ameri- cans an intricate system of theme and imagery. If "Fences" was Wilson at his least interesting, that's because it was linear: its eponymous image meant basically the same thing to all the characters. The central object in this play-the piano, a beautifully carved upright, decorated with faces and scenes-means something different to everyone. To Boy Willie, who wants to use money from the sale of the piano to buy the land his family worked as slaves and sharecroppers, the piano means the future and his spiritual emancipation. To his widowed sis- ter Berniece (S. Epatha Merkerson), whose father died stealing it from the man who owned it, the piano means a heritage of grief, bitterness, and women without men. To Berniece's would-be suitor, Avery (Tommy Hol- lis), the piano represents the baggage of sorrow he wants her to relinquish. For Berniece and Boy Willie's uncle, Wining Boy (Lou Myers), a former recording artist, the piano was once a living and is now a burden, and to Boy Willie's friend Lymon (Rocky Car- roll), an interloper, it's just a good story. To Doaker (Carl Gordon), the head of the household, whose grandfa- ther carved pictures of his wife and son on the piano for the slave owner who sold the wife and son in order to buy it, the piano embodies the family's history -symbolically and in concrete terms. If a man carves pictures of his wife and son on a piano, to whom do the pictures belong: the artist or the man who owns the piano and once owned the wife and son? Which is more im- portant, the future or the past? How do